Peter Pan Goes Wrong is 'slapstick anarchy' - Apollo Theatre, review

To die, Peter Pan winsomely opined, “would be an awfully big adventure”. It is an adventure on which the cast of Peter Pan Goes Wrong seem all too likely to embark, as a troupe of amateur players find their attempt to stage Barrie’s beloved play beset by catastrophe.

Everyone loves a theatrical disaster, and Neverland provides an ideal environment for the combination of slapstick and thespian chagrin that won audience hearts (and an Olivier award) for Mischief Theatre’s long-running farce, The Play That Goes Wrong.

The cod programme notes for Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s festive Pan hint ominously at near-fatal technical problems during rehearsals (a live crocodile was involved). Sure enough, a lackadaisical stage hand has barely concluded the health and safety announcements before anarchy takes hold, with spectacular flying disasters, Tinkerbell plugged into the mains and scenery with a malevolent will of its own – including a set of bunk beds in the Darling children’s nursery that subsides into a grisly millefeulle of collapsed slats and squashed actors.

The opening scenes test to the limit the idea that the comic impact of a joke increases with each repetition. Mr Darling prat-falls in spilt medicine; John Darling, fed his lines through a headset, obediently intones snatches of interference from police radios and Classic FM; Mrs Darling, frantically quick-changing, appears in ever more startling disarray. You wonder whether they can keep going like this all evening. You wonder if you can.

But any intimations of restiveness are swiftly banished by the exuberant physicality of Adam Meggido’s production, and the extraordinary technical brilliance of Simon Scullion’s sets. Henry Shields and Henry Lewis as joint actor/directors Chris Bean and Robert Grove, give bravura accounts of characters hopelessly at odds with the physical world. Tom Edden as the narrator, gallantly wrangling a wayward chair, resembles a satanic JM Barrie, while Ellie Morris as a frail ingenue and Dave Hearn as a stage-struck crocodile bring an authentic whiff of Neverland pathos to proceedings.

The odd tweak remains to be made – the action pauses rather too frequently for “audition tapes” in which the actors’ tangled relationships are awkwardly revealed. But if the heroically inappropriate dance routines, intractable props, a Tinkerbell disastrously addicted to bump ’n’ grind and a formidably high casualty rate among the cast don’t grip you with an agonising fou-rire, you really are too grown-up for Neverland.